What is Fundación Capital?
As part of this Scaling Snapshot, see also Fundación Capital’s Getting Ready for Scale, Scaling Strategies, and Scaling Pearls of Wisdom. You can find the full scaling snapshot PDF here.
Organizational Overview
The Audacious Goal: Fundación Capital (FC) seeks to eliminate extreme poverty by ensuring that people have access to knowledge and tools that enable them to save, build assets, and manage risk. By 2025, FC expects to have reached 10 million people across 25 countries.
The Problem: Governments spend trillions of dollars on welfare programs
to address poverty, yet too few of the programs provide more than temporary relief to the poor.
The Solution: Fundación Capital aims to align the needs and leverage the assets of all financial services and livelihoods’ stakeholders — including low-income families themselves — to co-develop long-term, scalable solutions, increase access to financial services, and build economic resilience.
The Impact: As of 2018, FC has improved the financial lives of more than 6 million people in 18 countries. Partnering with governments and financial institutions, Fundación Capital works to improve systems and increase the economic well-being and prospects of millions of people so that they can get out of and stay out of poverty.
The Model-in-Brief: Fundación Capital works with public and private sector partners to ensure that financial service and economic opportunity programs meet the needs of low-income populations and that programs align with the incentives of the public and private institutions that deliver them. In order to support the development and testing of programs, FC employs a user-centered approach through the following steps:
- Assess the assets and gaps in-country related to the financial lives of the poor.
- Develop relationships with relevant stakeholders, including government, financial institutions, and low-income communities.
- Co-design, with all stakeholders, programs and strategies to address identified gaps and leverage assets to lay the foundation for systems change.
- Support piloting and implementation of programs through private and public sector partners.
FC has a portfolio of tested solutions and is able to accelerate progress in new countries by leveraging and adapting these for new contexts or, where appropriate, creating new solutions.
The Core Innovation: Partnerships and Alignment. FC departs from the way financial inclusion and economic opportunity initiatives are traditionally delivered (i.e., short- term, top-down) by bringing together the key public, private, and end-user stakeholders to co-create programs that align with the needs and incentives of each, so as to ensure long-term sustainability and scalability.
Published March 2019. Find the full Scaling Snapshot PDF at https://rebrand.ly/fundacioncapitalscaling.
Authored by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin.
